Beta Pencil

[sebt3]

Hi there,

Pencil is an animation/drawing software. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

(yep posting a mac screenshot as there is no linux package to date... beside this one )

[ Download ] [ Website ]

 

[Prometheus]

Oh, wow, this is cool. I'll have to play with this when I have the free time to do so - it looks pretty intuitive. Many thanks for porting this!

 

[Pleng]

The productivity tools on Pandroa would be an AWFUL lot thinner on the ground if it wasn't for good old sebt3. 3 cheers!

 

[mcobit]

This is a nice drwaingtool, but the animationpart is useless on pandora, because the screen is too smal to be useful.

 

[Bosbeetle]

whoo will check this out. And hope to lure my friend into making a "epic toast man" with this.

BTW I love Guust Flater

 

[xopher]

Thanks! I appreciate this software and sebt3!!

 

[Farox]

I have very few graphic skills ..but i like this kind of software !

As usual thank Sebt3

If the port work as expected (and i have no doubt about it) why not inform the author that a Pandora port is available ? And if possible every port you/me/others made , so to increase
visibility of Pandora and maybe users.
What do you think about it ?

 

[sebt3]

If the port work as expected (and i have no doubt about it)

You should. I do have annonced many things here that end-up being dead horses :
- Osmo
- Inkscape
- banshe
and a few others...
But this one work as expected

why not inform the author that a Pandora port is available ? And if possible every port you/me/others made , so to increase
visibility of Pandora and maybe users.
What do you think about it ?

I've done this in the past :
- The zelda games (the pandora port is mentioned on the webpages)
- deadbeef (my patch made upstream, pandora is mentionned in the changelog)

For some I think it's tricky. Like this one. The default configuration dont fit the screen. It is workable by moving the dockbar. I even managed to create simple animation with it. Otherwise, it work realy well. But it is far from offering the initially intended experience. So I think advertising Pencil on pandora wont do good for the pencil project as the full experience isnt there and it wont do goods for our project either as the limiting factor is the pandora's screen...

But this is still a good idea IMHO and if someone point me the projects i should contact , I'll warm up my mail box.

EDIT : @Prometheus & bosbeetle : I'm waiting your usage reportto upload this to the filearchive

 

[Esn]

Thanks a lot, sebt3! I was the one who added this to "Port Requests". I'm so disappointed that I don't have a Pandora to try it on. It's looking like I might only get it in December.

If the configuration is too small for the screen resolution, how hard would it be to make some sort of workaround? From what I can see, it's the height, not the width, that's the problem. So how about this: remove the timeline frame from the bottom and have it "pop up" on top of everything else only when you press an easy-to-reach button, so that you can move through the frames & watch the rest of the screen change, then make it go away when you press the button again. Maybe even make it slightly transparent, so that you can see the part of the screen that it's covering. Again, I don't have a Pandora, so maybe this is already possible, I don't know.

P.S. Pencil supports pressure sensitivity when you're drawing. I remember hearing that the Pandora's touchscreen actually does have some pressure sensitivity. Anyone know anything about that?
If not, I wonder if it's possible to connect a graphics tablet via USB...

EDIT: I found this

Notaz, who was working with the touch screen driver, says it can do some pressure sensing and returns around 16 different values for pressure (link). This is not sensitive the way Wacom tablets are, but should allow simple pressure sensitivity if applications are designed for it. For software development, it is accessible through standard Linux event interface (raw values), or tslib (calibrated).

P.P.S. If anyone is curious, here's something interesting I found. An animation production pipeline made up of entirely open-source programs:

 

[Prometheus]

EDIT : @Prometheus & bosbeetle : I'm waiting your usage reportto upload this to the filearchive

Please don't wait on mine - I'm afraid I've got a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I honestly can't guarantee when I'll have the time to check it out.

 

[torpor]

That is one hell of a pipeline Esn .. I'd love to see something similar for 3D games, with 3D assets ..

 

[Oluseyi]

Hi. My name is Oluseyi and I'm one of the project members and maintainers of Pencil. I saw Esn's post on our forums about this and thought I'd drop by and say hi

First off, wow. I remember the GP32 and GP32X from quite a few years ago. (I used to be heavily involved in GameDev.Net.) I quickly brushed up on Wikipedia and I must say I'm impressed that Pandora shipped. Great job! As to Pencil running on Pandora, a.) good job on the port; and b.) how usable are you finding it?

Pencil was designed with an emphasis on tablet input. Even mouse users often find it rather frustrating, so I can't imagine the challenge that analog stick input must present - unless you're working with touchscreen input, which could be interesting. Either way, I'd be very interested to hear how usable you find it, feedback on Pencil itself in general, and suggestions on ways to make Pencil better and easier to port.

Cheers!

 

[sebt3]

Hi. My name is Oluseyi and I'm one of the project members and maintainers of Pencil. I saw Esn's post on our forums about this and thought I'd drop by and say hi

First off, wow. I remember the GP32 and GP32X from quite a few years ago. (I used to be heavily involved in GameDev.Net.) I quickly brushed up on Wikipedia and I must say I'm impressed that Pandora shipped. Great job! As to Pencil running on Pandora, a.) good job on the port; and b.) how usable are you finding it?

Pencil was designed with an emphasis on tablet input. Even mouse users often find it rather frustrating, so I can't imagine the challenge that analog stick input must present - unless you're working with touchscreen input, which could be interesting. Either way, I'd be very interested to hear how usable you find it, feedback on Pencil itself in general, and suggestions on ways to make Pencil better and easier to port.

Cheers!

Hi,

About the port, It was just a compilation away (no code change at all)
The pandora screen is touch enabled, but pencil currently suport it as a mouse pointer.

Sure the screen resolution is a bit tight for pencil, but the ability the show/hide the color panel easily help a lot.
I'm using it with the timeline bar as float (with only the title visible on the bottom of the screen). I'm stacking tools selection panel and the options panel together (with the toggles buttons bellow) to save vertical space. This way, pencil is usable.

My only wish would be to be allowed to fix that. So when I'm moving the time line up it don't try to get back in the main window which is quiet annoying :S

Otherwise, great software. I've yet to discover it's vectorial feature, but I hope this turn out better than with inkscape

 

[Oluseyi]

Hi,

About the port, It was just a compilation away (no code change at all)
The pandora screen is touch enabled, but pencil currently suport it as a mouse pointer.

Sure the screen resolution is a bit tight for pencil, but the ability the show/hide the color panel easily help a lot.
I'm using it with the timeline bar as float (with only the title visible on the bottom of the screen). I'm stacking tools selection panel and the options panel together (with the toggles buttons bellow) to save vertical space. This way, pencil is usable.

My only wish would be to be allowed to fix that. So when I'm moving the time line up it don't try to get back in the main window which is quiet annoying :S

Otherwise, great software. I've yet to discover it's vectorial feature, but I hope this turn out better than with inkscape

Hi sebt3,

Wow, that's great. Port to a different platform with just a recompile, thanks to the cross-platform libraries/technologies Pencil is built on? Sweet!

Is the Pandora touchscreen resistive or capacitive? If the former, does using a simple plastic stylus (like they used to package with PDAs and smartphones five years ago) help drawing accuracy, and if the latter maybe you could try some of the styluses available for the iPad?

I'm proposing a fairly radical user interface overhaul for Pencil in the next 6 to 12 months. Maybe as part of that process we can look at usability on constrained displays and come up with UI toggles, etc that help maximize the drawing area.

 

[Esn]

Is the Pandora touchscreen resistive or capacitive?

It is resistive, with about 16 levels of pressure sensitivity. It comes with a stylus. Sebt3, does the Pandora version of Pencil make use of pressure sensitivity (or can it be made to)?

I'm proposing a fairly radical user interface overhaul for Pencil in the next 6 to 12 months. Maybe as part of that process we can look at usability on constrained displays and come up with UI toggles, etc that help maximize the drawing area.

Neat. Although I hope that it doesn't mean that things will get too complex. Pencil trades off rich features for intuitive usability, which I think is a good trade. It lives up to what it's named after.

 

[Iorgy77]

I am very impressed with this. I quickly was able to make a test animation and was very happy with the results.

Like others I find space a bit tight with docked toolbars and floating toolbars are hard to use as they actually increase in size.

If I could suggest one feature request for the original author it would be to have a copy last cell next to the create new cell button.

 

[sebt3]

Sebt3, does the Pandora version of Pencil make use of pressure sensitivity ?

When I said "supported as a mouse", I tried to say that the pressure sensitivity wasn't there

or can it be made to ?

I wouldn't even know where to start

 

[Esn]

or can it be made to ?

I wouldn't even know where to start

Maybe ask notaz? He seemed to know what he was talking about over here.

It would be really neat if this worked.

If I could suggest one feature request for the original author it would be to have a copy last cell next to the create new cell button.

Well, if we're asking for feature requests... it would be nice if there was an option in the onion skinning to see more than only the previous & next frame.

 

[Bosbeetle]

EDIT : @Prometheus & bosbeetle : I'm waiting your usage reportto upload this to the filearchive

Please don't wait on mine - I'm afraid I've got a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I honestly can't guarantee when I'll have the time to check it out.

same here

 

[benced]

Hi,

Am interested in being able to do this kind of stuff on my pandora (when it arrives.)

Is anyone brave enough to post the animations they've made, to see the quality achieved based on the pandora touchscreen input?

Iorgy77? sebt3?